Hemingway, Castro, and Cuba

In his piece on William Morgan and the Cuban Revolution, David Grann refers on several occasions to letters about Morgan written by Times correspondent Herbert Matthews to Ernest Hemingway. “Matthews said that he thought Morgan’s saga was ‘like an Ernest Hemingway story,’” Grann writes. Hemingway lived off and on in Cuba for two decades, at a plantation he called Finca Vigía, which he and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, purchased in 1940. It was there that he recuperated from his trips to Europe and Africa by fishing and drinking Daiquiris at the bar of the Floridita restaurant. And it was also there that he wrote his masterpiece, “The Old Man and the Sea.” Hemingway left the island for good in 1960, the year after Castro overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista—and the year before he took his own life in Idaho.

The question of Hemingway’s relations with Castro was considered in Jacobo Timerman’s 1990 article, “A Summer in the Revolution: 1987.” Timerman, who toured the island taking the country’s pulse, noted that “with the exception of the worship of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, no worship is promoted more in Cuba than the worship of Ernest Hemingway.” Yet, he wrote, “the Hemingway cult … was created more as a tourist attraction and propoganda device than anything else.” Timerman visited both the Finca Vigía and the port of Cojimar, from which Hemingway used to depart on his fishing trips. Timerman wrote,

The revolutionaries never viewed Hemingway sympathetically; he had taken little interest in Cuba … or in the fight against Batista or in the bearded guerillas of the Sierra Maestra…. Since Hemingway’s suicide, in 1961, attempts have been made to infer signs of sympathy for Cuba on his part, affinities, a declaration, a gesture. Although it’s never stated explicitly, the tourist gets the impression that Hemingway supported Fidel Castro, that the writer is part of the Revolution. The truth is that … the regime never managed to establish a solid link between Hemingway and Castroism.

Timerman reports that Castro and Hemingway met only once—in May of 1960, at a fishing contest held in Hemingway’s honor. “There are numerous photographs of that meeting, but nothing noteworthy in the words that were exchanged before witnesses—mere formalities, really.” Life magazine published one of those photographs along with a record of an exchange between Castro, who won the competition, and Hemingway, who awarded him the trophy: “‘I am a novice at fishing,’ said Fidel. ‘You are a lucky novice,’ replied Ernest.”

That photograph and its caption became the inspiration for John Updike’s 1960 poem, “Meditation on a News Item,” in which Updike speculated on the dynamic between the two “magnificently recognizable” bearded men. To Updike, the meeting seemed “immeasurably strange”:

as strange to me as if there were found, in a Jacobean archive, an unquestionably authentic woodcut showing Shakespeare presenting the blue ribbon for Best Cake Baked to Queen Elizabeth.

Updike imagines Castro’s application to participate in the tournament—“Occupation: Dictator. Address / Top Floor, Habana-Hilton Hotel (commandeered). / Hobbies: Ranting, U.S.-Baiting, Fishing (novice)”—and then pictures him competing in the water against “cabdrivers, pimps, restaurant waiters, small landowners,” while Hemingway “panted back and forth / plying his tape measure.” He concludes the poem delightedly:

My mind sinks down through the layers of strangeness: I am as happy as if I had opened a copy of “Alice in Wonderland” in which the heroine does win the croquet contest administered by the Queen of Hearts.

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